09/10/2006

A journey of one thousand piles starts with the first step

Following the advice of our favorite communist folk hero Woody Guthrie, this weekend we decided to organize. While his concept of organizing included exciting elements such as marches, rallies, and protest songs, ours was decidedly more mundane. It involved stacking... and piling...and arranging. At times, we arranged our stacks into piles. This was often followed by re-stacking our arranged piles into new arrangements of piled stacks. Then would we pile our stacked arrangements into stacks of piles. Then all of our hard work would be covered by a tarp.

We spent one and a half days doing this, and we still aren’t quite finished. Luckily we had our second bit of free labor, Anne’s dad Fran. He called on Friday to see if we needed help. I informed him we would be mostly stacking and piling and arranging. Being a librarian, he salivated at the opportunity and arrived on Saturday afternoon, and dutifully helped us to organize. But we did let him have a little fun as he showed us how he used to cut boards before the advent of electricity.

He also arrived with two six-packs of beer and a dozen eggs. While not an obvious pairing of food, both served us quite well over the course of the weekend.

I cut the rest of the sill plates by hand (sill plates are the pieces of wood directly attached to the foundation), and they should all be attached by tomorrow. I believe you can count today as our first ‘official’ day of building. Insert fanfare here.